Remembering women in the fight against AIDS

“History has the power to shape not only what we remember, but what we forget.” In the final paragraph of the introduction to In Her Hands, Women's Fight Against AIDS in the United States, historian Emma Day perfectly sums up the message behind her book. Day seeks to readdress the narrative around women's fight against HIV/AIDS and the political systems that overlooked, mistreated, and maligned them during the 1980s epidemic of the disease. It is her intention to ensure that we remember the struggles that women faced with accuracy and in their entirety, as no one subgroup of sufferers should take precedence in the history books when we recall the scale and severity of this disease.